Damnation
by catzlovecheeze
Summary: Humanity was damned because my blood hadn't spilled. I couldn't forgive Joel for taking me from that hospital, couldn't forgive myself for not going back. And couldn't confide in anyone this guilt I felt. Well, until I met Leah. And she opened my eyes. A Last Of Us oneshot about Ellie and her survivor's guilt.


I knew it was lie. Those two little words.

"I swear."

It was a lie. I knew it was. But I hadn't shown it. Instead, I played along.

"Okay."

We were here. We were together. He was the one person who hadn't left me, who hadn't died. The one person in my life.

And I was willing to give this life a shot. If it was with Joel, I could do it. I could stick by him as he had stuck by me. I had said it myself; "We stick together."

I could make this sacrifice.

And I was glad I took a shot at this life with Joel, I guess. I was safe, well-fed, clean. All firsts in my life. And I was almost content.

Almost, but not quite.

I could still laugh, grin, at a funny story. But I would always feel the darkness return, slowly creep over me again, the feeling that I was damning humanity. That if I would only leave; go back to the Fireflies, I could save humanity from dying. I tried to reason with myself; said there was no way I could make the entire journey by myself, that I would die on the way there, that they would have moved again by the time I got there.

It didn't help. Usually, you can justify anything with reasoning, but this was too strong. I knew the truth, and the truth was that I was only making excuses. I was strong enough to get there, smart enough to find them, and obligated to humanity to do this.

And that killed me. Knowing that I could save lives and was staying here for my own selfish wants.

But it wasn't really my own wants. I knew what I wanted; I wanted to save humanity. Joel was the one that took me from there, this was his wants. I stayed because he was like my dad, and I loved him as so, but me staying alive was really his desires.

I felt this when I looked at him. That I was damning humanity because of him. That people were being infected because he took me from that hospital. That I had to live with this guilt because of him.

And that tore a rift between us.

"You're awfully quiet lately, Ellie." He remarked one day. I just shrugged. I knew he was worried, but it was hard to talk to him now. I couldn't confide in him about this guilt I felt, because he was, at the root, the cause of it. It didn't help that he had lied about it; it was as if this conflict shouldn't even exist, because I couldn't have done anything anyways.

How I tried to convince myself of that candy-coated lie. Sweet, even if it was pure deception. I tried to believe it, but never could.

I was actually very grateful when Tommy assigned me to work a small garden. He said he needed someone to help with the food production, and while the thought of growing crops was actually somewhat of a cool idea to me, I was mainly happy to be able to get out of the house. I could always feel Joel looking at me, wanting me to look at him, but I couldn't. I couldn't forgive what he'd done. I couldn't shake the feeling that if only he had left me, I could be free of all this guilt, and humanity free of this curse.

It hurt to think of him that way. But it was the truth, and I couldn't force my mind to believe elsewise.

I was a bit surprised to learn I would be working with a partner in the field. I met her when I showed up. She wasn't especially pretty, and she had wavy, almost frizzy brown hair. Her eyes were a dark hazel. She was a year younger than me, as I learned later. She extended a hand.

"Hey. My name's Leah. Yours?"

She filled the days with talk, stories that she had heard of the world Before. By Before, I mean before the infection. Before everyone went crazy or died. Before everything went to shit. At first I didn't listen a whole lot, preoccupied with guilt. But after a couple times of being unable to tune her out, which annoyed me at first, I realized she actually had something to say. I started listening. I started talking with her.

I started liking her.

As the plants grew from fragile, pale sprouts, filling out, flowering, so too did our friendship. I told her about me and Joel traveling across the country, (leaving out the part about my immunity; that was still a secret held by me and Joel in our broken relationship), and she listened with rapt attention as she pulled weeds and watered plants. In return, she taught me songs of the world Before, told me stories of the mysterious history. I listened, entranced, as we moved down the rows of plants under the hot sun and over the warm Earth.

I was actually happy for the first few months of being friends with Leah. But the guilt eventually caught up with me, coming with me from home; where I had never been free of it, with me to the field. My time with Leah reminded me of my time with Riley. And I owed it to Riley to sacrifice myself for a vaccine. If I had known I was immune, she could have still been alive. I couldn't save her now, but I could save others now, make sure no one had to go like she did.

It was killing me, and I couldn't leave it all bottled up inside. But I couldn't talk about it to Joel, either.

I had another person I could talk to now, though. A new friend who would listen. Leah.

I was nervous about it. I picked my words very carefully; I was terrified she would suspect I was infected if I said the wrong thing. I worked up the courage to talk to her about it one day, as she stood attacking weeds with a hoe.

"Hey, Leah?" I asked.

"Yeah?" She asked, turning to me.

"Do you ever wonder what it might be like…if the world was like Before? Like, not like this had never happened, but like if they found a cure. Or even just a vaccine. Ever wonder what it would be like if the world could heal from this?"

"Heal from this? You mean the cordyceps?" She asked. I nodded.

She considered it, rocking the hoe back and forth as she passed the handle between her hands.

"I don't know if a cure would really work. It'd be hard to get to the infected to inject them or whatever. As for a vaccine; well, I guess that would mean that we wouldn't have to worry about being infected, but the infected could still kill us." She turned to me. "A vaccine wouldn't work, though."

I bit my lip, trying to phrase it right. "I know that the vaccination tests all failed, but if one did work. Like, what would that be like?"

She pursed her lips. "That's not what I meant. I understand that you meant an effective vaccine, but think about it. It sounds good on paper; no more infected. And maybe it would work well, to, if the world was still together." She looked up at the sky. "The government would take control of it, and the government and a lot of survivors don't get along. All the raiders and stuff; we wouldn't be able to vaccinate them. They would shoot anyone getting close to them."

"If there was a vaccine, and no more risk or infection, people would want to go back out. Try to reclaim cities. The problem is, those cities have already been claimed by raiders. And I don't think they plan on handing them over. It would lead to a lot of bloodshed."

She was talking about the possibility of a vaccine like it was a bad thing. Sure, there were possible complications, but how did she not see the obvious? I tried to explain. "With a vaccine, no one could get infected. They could vaccinate everyone in the quarantine zones, they could be safe from turning into one of those things!" Leah glanced over at me, and I realized I was getting kind of loud. This was upsetting me, but I had to seem like it wasn't too big of a deal; protect my secret. Keep it a calm, intellectual debate. I tried to quiet myself. "I mean, humanity is dying. We're being consumed by this; more people are infected every day. We could die out."

Leah stared up at the sky, a little breeze blowing a few frizzy curls out of place. "More people do get infected every day, I'm sure. But not a whole lot, I'm also sure. People are smarter now; they know to stay away from the infected." She turned to me. "You say we're dying, but look around you." I glanced around at the town to the west of the garden. "We're here, and we're surviving. Groups like ours, and ones different from ours, like the raiders, they survive too." She smiled, casting her eyes to me. "I'd say we're doing alright, even without a vaccine."

She gestured to herself and then to me. "We're surviving."

I looked at her, at the town, at the sky.

"That's a new take on things."

The idea that we don't need a vaccine, that we can survive without one.

It might be worth entertaining. Maybe I could accept it one day, if I find it to be true. Maybe I could let it take this guilt from my shoulders of damning humanity.

Because maybe I didn't.

Maybe Joel didn't. And that would make it forgivable that he took me from that hospital.

I would like that a lot. To be able to forgive him.

I kicked the idea around a little, testing it in the palm of my mind, seeing how it felt to me.

Certainly a thought worth entertaining.

Catz: It certainly is.

I didn't mean that this should be canon, or even that I believe that it's true. The Last of Us is too much of a game to have any one opinion on it. I got the idea for this after watching an analysis of the game on YouTube, found here /watch?v=ImvQs0fPJqU ,and while I certainly do not agree with everything he said in the analysis, I did find that one point interesting, that humanity was surviving without a vaccine.

And thus this was born. Not my best work, but the original was connected with Survior's guilt as one story, and I like them separately a LOT more. And I'm sure someone out there will like this. The two aren't intended as companion pieces, however.

Leave a review, Skittles!~


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